So I guess it's easier to blast fashion companies for using skinny-looking models instead of just admitting that being overweight is not okay as obesity is responsible for more preventable deaths and healthcare costs than anything else we have ever seen.

Honestly, why are these companies always seen as the "bad guys" when they are likely responsible for many times more people taking control and becoming healthy than our health educational system could have ever hoped for? I guess it's easier to blame them for their "unrealistic" ideals than it is to blame ourselves for our sedentary and over-indulging lifestyles transforming our bodies into something they were never designed to become in the first place.

They are classics because they were amazing and innovative games for the time period they were released in. However they would not hold up to games today if they were released in this console generation with appropriate graphics/sound.

Developers have to continue to innovate and adapt to using new technologies and the changing marketplace. Granted, Square-Enix very good at it and created the mess that was FF13, but it is still something that has to be done. They just need to do it right, like they used to.

The usual action is:
See red light
You estimate distance and start to break on the engine (shifting down progressively without applying gas), this breaks you fluently (you don't cause a wave of hard stopping behind you)
If the light jumps green, you apply gas and you are in perfect gear to accellerate and continue driving
If the light stays on red, you keep on breaking on the engine until stopped and you wait.

Progressively downshifting is arguably worse than braking, as instead of putting wear on the brake pads you are now wearing out the clutch disc and gear synchros. Brake pads replacement is cheap, clutch and transmission labor is less cheap.

It's not at all worth being "in the perfect gear". Just put it into the correct gear if you happen to be able to accelerate again before stopping, it will require less maintenance on the transmission.

I read a story from a girl who took her laptop in to Best Buy for work (Geek Squad?) and found that the video cam was routing output to one of their addresses. I never use mine and it's something I would have never even considered checking.

Yeah that story sounds about as credible as the in-home Geek Squad technician who was supposedly video taping some girl in the shower with his phone that she got hold of and then deleted the video (oops) before anyone of any authority was able to see and verify it.

As a former employee of that company, I can understand the hate. But much of the hate is misdirected. The technicians don't want to waste their time opening up computers and "optimizing" them anymore than you want your item to be opened before you get it. These kind of initiatives come from above even the store management. Ask the manager for address of the district office and write a letter to them, that's the only way you are going to reach anyone with any kind of say in the what the store is actually doing.

As a fitness professional who has worked with a countless number of people at different fitness levels in different stages of their lives, trying to quantify the number of years gained with exercise completely misses the point and is deceiving.

Truthfully exercise will probably net someone little to no extra years in their life. However the quality of those years is where the significant difference will be. If someone wishes to be physically active with their body well into their elder years, then exercise will allow for that. However if someone is content being completely inactive, then exercise will provide little benefit to them and honestly they should just not bother with it.

Diet will have a far bigger impact on actual life expectancy than exercise ever could.

The downfall of America continues, right in your own sports bar. And you thought it was bad enough when you walk into the bar in April or May and end up watching women's college softball, the Little League World Series now, or "World Championship Poker" at other random times during the year

Because major league baseball is at all any more interesting than what you mentioned? Hell, there's probably more hits and action going on in women's softball and little league, and at least watching poker you can learn something.

Be honest with yourself, in both cases you are sitting on your ass and watching TV, cheering on your favorite player/team of choice performing what they are better than almost all of the world's population at doing. The competitive spirit encompasses both the mental and the physical.

So the time we get to play the game DRM free is around about the time everyone else loses interest and the community has pretty much moved on? I'll pass.

Well yeah...isn't your entire point of DRM removal so that you are not restricted from playing the game many years later on in life? Whether or not the community is still alive at that point is up to the players to decide for themselves.

And demand will only go up, no matter how fixed-up or fucked-up the health care system gets.

Is that what your guidance counselor told you? Because it's a total lie. Nursing schools are churning out many more nurses than there are jobs for. My singificant other and most of her family are nurses or nursing school graduates and many of them are either unemployed or have had to look for work in completely unrelated industries. Hospitals are hurting as well in this economy. Nursing staff gets cut like in any other industry, meaning the poor suckers who managed to keep their jobs are now left to deal with double to triple the workload.

This little IT sob story has nothing on the demanding, gruesome, and unappreciated duties nurse is expected to perform on a daily basis. So the manager gave him a stern talking to for being 20 minutes late to a meeting? Try working in a hospital when staffing levels are as low as they are now, with hundreds of patients in unstable emotional states and physical pain taking out their aggressions on the nurses because their needs aren't being attended to as quickly as they desire.

Seriously, staying up late every once in awhile and bringing a server back online is a freaking vacation compared to what you'd have to deal with every single shift as a nurse. To suggest going to nursing school to "escape" anything, most especially a fairly low key IT job, is completely ridiculous. Go to nursing school because you are interested in health, the human body, and caring for others. Do not fool yourself into believing it is an escape in any way, shape, or form.

About 5 years ago, turntables outsold guitars in Japan - probably not the case now but there are LOTS of people who have inner DJs to let out, you just didn't provide the right tools.

That's definitely not why DJ Hero failed. Beatmania (the game DJ Hero was trying to copy) was a massive success in the 90's are early 2000's. Rythm and music games have proven to be successful, regardless of how unrealistic Guitar Hero is to playing a guitar or Dance Dance Revolution is to real dancing. You don't need to provide realistic tools in order for people to enjoy it. DJ Hero definitely didn't fail because of the lack of quality or realism of the turntable interface, it would have failed regardless of the controller used.

Activision just thought they could duplicate the success they had when Konami's other popular music game Guitar Freaks was copied successfully by Guitar Hero. But unfortunately Activision just didn't do their homework on the Beatmania demographic before deciding on DJ Hero. Beatmania already had lots of exposure in the U.S. already (unlike Guitar Freaks) as you could find a Beatmania machine in just about every arcade. Plus fans of the series have already long since imported their Beatmania titles and controllers and have moved on to other things. So it was more a combination of Beatmania already being played out (like any music/rhythm game will be over time) and a horrible set list that completely did not mesh with the demographic that would have gone for this type of game.

Look at the Rock Band guys by contrast. These were the developers who invented the original Guitar Hero gameplay.

Konami should be credited for the "invention" of the gameplay in Guitar Hero and Rock Band, not Harmonix. The only reason Guitar Hero and Rock Band came into existence were because of the peripheral manufacturer Red Octane who was previously famous for making Dance Dance Revolution controllers wanting to invest in someone to copycat Konami's Guitar Freaks outside of Japan. It was only a matter of time before Drum Mania's gameplay was included as well. If Harmonix would be credited for anything it would be the singing part of Rock Band, but the music genre of video games had already been very well established long before the masses were exposed to it with Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

3) I've never heard of terminal velocity being expressed as "VMAX", and neither have the first ten pages of google results.

To be fair, this rebuttable was equally weak. Understandably Google has provided us with a large quantity of instant searchable information that we've come to rely on as our point of reference, but sometimes you just need to look at an actual book...

In Phantom Menace Ray Park (Darth Maul) actually wanted all of the moves in the fight scenes to have legitimate targets. As in: I am swinging for his head, he is trying to stop me from hitting his head, etc.

Are you kidding me? Watch those fights again, what you speak of clearly did not happen. Most of the strikes were aimed directly at the light sabers and not intended to ever hit the body.

Yes, Ray Park is an experienced and talented martial artist, but he also clearly recongized that he is performing fight choreography for a mass-market movie made purely for entertainment. He was never aiming to simulate a real fight, rather he simply needed to add speed and vitality to the fight scenes as compared to the original movies since that is what Lucas asked him to do.

When you perform martial arts for an audience like that, you must be aware that your audience needs to see and understand what is happening. A simulation of a real fight would never work in a movie or on stage, because the fighters would otherwise be seeking to conserve energy and remove unnecessary movement. This would not look very good to an audience as the audience be unable to comprehend what is happening since everything would be too fast and too short for entertainment value.

One thing I've always wondered is why California needs so much money to operate.

Here in NH, we've got no sales tax and no income tax.

Despite this dearth of income, we manage to keep the roads plowed, the schools funded, and the streetlights burning.

What am I missing?

Oh I don't know, you just might be missing how ridiculous it is to compare the most highly populated state in the country to one of the lowest, with a geographical disparity between the two that is just as large.

Not to say California's budget has been managed appropriately or anything, but I'm going to guess there would probably be a hell of a lot more streetlights, schools, and roads to pay for in a state than can fit 18 of your New Hampshires in it...

I'm starting to wonder if consoles are a dying breed. They used to come out every 3-5 years like clockwork, with major advances every time. Now every maker seems to be phoning it in.

It has nothing to do with consoles being a dying breed or anything like that. It simply has to do with the diminishing returns on hardware advances and where they can take the game industry now versus where they could take it 20 years ago. This applies to the PC as well.

Remember when things like more CPU bits, available storage space, and a couple MB of RAM made massive differences in the types of games that could be made? Now what will those kind of advances get us? Some more pixels, more FPS, a cool lighting effect, some more detailed textures here and like a 10th discreet sound channel that almost no one owns a sound system for. None of that makes any difference in the actual game itself, you can still make the exact same game without any of those "improvements".

Bottom line, the hardware doesn't limit game developers from making the game they want to make anymore, the limit is now simply budget as these "advances" now require that much more out of development. Further advances in hardware at this point definitely aren't going to change the landscape of gaming like it did in the 4 -> 8 -> 16 -> 32-bit eras.